Researchers at the University of Kansas Information Telecommunication Technology Center will seek to improve Internet service by developing or refining the rules, or protocols, that govern the information highway, under a new two-year contract with Kansas City - based Sprint Corp.
"Like telephone service, Internet service comes with consumer expectations," says Joseph B. Evans, director of ITTC's Networking and Distributed Systems Lab. "With telephones, you want to get a dial tone 99.9 percent of the time. You want to hear clearly and without time delays. Internet customers also don't want delays, downtime or disconnects, and they don't want lost data."
Internet Protocol (IP) functions much like other protocols or governing rules. Rather than a formal agreement between nations, however, IP governs the messages that travel along the Internet. IP helps determine how fast messages will travel and which messages will get priority.
Doctoral student Peter T. Whiting says the protocol the research will help create will partly be based on precedence. "If I'm talking to my mom on the phone and you're e-mailing your mother a message, which should have priority as to quality of service?" he asks.
Clearly phone users will notice a few-seconds interruption in service, Whiting says. "What if in that time I said, 'Mom, I love you'? But your mother wouldn't notice if her e-mail arrived a few seconds later. In fact, she might not read it for hours."
The ITTC team, which includes Evans, Gary J. Minden, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Sprint employees, and Whiting and two other KU graduate students, Steven Pennington and Kelly Stump, is using advanced networking gear like that used by the major carriers.
"It's rare to find this level of equipment at the academic research level," Evans says. "We have the unique ability to model a real carrier backbone, gather real data, and set up test scenarios. By modeling a network, the team will find ways to improve it."
Whiting welcomes the chance to play with a network system. A former senior network engineer with Sprint in Washington, D.C., he was responsible for the upkeep of Sprint's backbone routers. As an ITTC researcher, he can create and then solve problems within the test system.
"Adding quality of service to the rules that govern the Internet is the way the industry is going to grow," Evans says. "Through this research, we help to bring up the standards and to address an important problem."
Evans thinks this research will befit Sprint, the Great Plains Network -- the regional backbone running north to south through the Midwest -- and Internet2, the next major upgrade in Internet capability.
Contact: Judith Galas, Information Telecommunication Technology Center, (785) 864-4776, jgalas@ittc.ukans.edu or Joe Evans, (785) 864-4830, evans@eecs.ukans.edu.